ENTHRALLED BY WINDS OF LONELINESS

Drifts of resonance cross separatrix connections to arjunadyhana resting places where we wish we could lie. But to survive must after must to feast of fruition, survive the toil of tranquillity that is the jambu garment of ivory flabellum, kahapana coins of copper, leaf and flower of malati tamali navamalika bimbijalaka campala asoka, tilaka, patali nipa, lembu, kadamba, earthsung gems offered to our eyes amid gamelan accompaniments in old Javanese languages of demeanor, spoken from the elevated rungs of neither fully wrong nor fully right — wrong thing said right is right, right thing said wrong is wrong. So sings the brush of Lady Sei Shonagon of saluang music in minangkabau nightfalls, the black-haired, scarlet-eyed, manqué concubines man-trolling the malls, the patterns of their deceits following the patterns of their garments: scallop shells and they’re fish, strung flowers and they’re gardens, clouds and they’re sky damsels, wave forms and they’re the sea of fecundity.

Androgynous warp achieves local vision of wefted ikat bleed with which you wear not what you are but what you suppose.

Honshu melmac on linoleum tables, Sunda lavender and Kelamantan pink, Kra drabbles of karst and ochre, red, too, and yellow and brown, all under a bowl of wildfire sky.

Chinese ink, Nadu Bharatya Natam, Kufic letters as angulate as their fervor, local villages of crawling crabs, crocodiles and phoenix, makara and naga and flail-tail dragons.

Gods give meaning to us we never find in each other.

Not in our words said which really aren’t meant, nor words meant which really aren’t said, but in a visit to the market stalls to hear the chaffer of the vendors,

Upanishad in Asian Pale

Or Down By The Docks

listening to the drunken bargemen sing.

When Sikhs Dance

Sukhdev, Goddess of Happiness, will-of-the-wisps across the threshold on her first Grand Entrance ever. She dances into evening elegance that replaces day’s wrinkles, where earth tones mix with azures and purples.

Cast off now from day’s moorings pale blue khameezes mix with white silk shoulder to wrist there to meet the iron bangles that distinguish Sikh from Punjabi within the same bit of geography. A sea of brown skin, bays of blue sequins, sandbanks of saffron sleeve.

Oval smiles cascade beneath flowerfalls of black orchid hair. Colors rich as sweets made of honey and ghee, noses delicious as sculpted chocolate.

Chandsingh, Lion of the Moon, old enough now to have earned his quavering voice, eyeglasses propped up on his turban, takes the microphone, entreaties, “Pray together, but if you have not the time, have at least dinner together.”

Chandkaur Princess of the Moon laments an old Punjabi love song:

I will build a home and make it a heaven for our love. Coming into your arms I am afraid for myself.

When my eyes meet yours, I become a fish out of water, fluttering fluttering.

With you I won’t sing of who I was before, I will sing that I am the music of a flute that bewitches into butterflies. River of my life, ocean of my love, listen to my prayer: My earth is empty, let your rains come. We are apart, bring us together. Take the light of my eyes and give it your rain, let my dry earth grow flowers in the dry season, let my prayer seduce the gods so I may seduce you and with my love change this earth into a land of flowers which turn my wilted leaves to fresh.

Women conceal their beauties with bodices falling Punjabi-style in sheer monochrome free-falls of benthic blue.

Saffron and matte gold on hither-eyed beauties, flickering faces

Upanishad in Asian Pale in the candlelit procession honoring the sacrament that is rice.

Crimson silk charcoal cotton gold brocade aladdin-toed shoes.

A tot of a girl in a pale yellow khameez and silk skirt of marble and gold carmel and gold garnet and gold cinnabar and gold moonstone and gold tourmaline and gold— she, mere sky child now, will one day emerge far-winged Sélène goddess of the moon.

Shawls drape chastely over throats streaming backward over the shoulders, angels with folded wings.

Flowing spangles and brocades iridesce into sari-fall osaris of pouring topaz. Dance music like an accordion on fast-forward, so riotous it justifies a garment of pink and tangerine tie-dye-edged with woven silver, worn by a little girl posing as Priceless Miss Precious before Daddy’s camera.

Formerly floral ladies who frumped before their time dress in grays, their version of gold with no glitter. Reds enough to envy a sunset emerald greens and sapphire blues black and silver laced with indigo. Vest and shalwar of gold-mine sequins cloaking a khameez’s unfathomable artistry of stripes as if to say weft is the loom’s most joy-giving gift. One woman wore a single solid hue, an impossible-to-conjure name between rose and crimson, neither too vermilion nor too carmine not quite carnelian with all of its browns yet neither quite cerise with its stage-whispers of black, she was red’s finest hour. Again Chandkaur sang or did the song sing her?

You gave me the heartache of love yet where are you now?

I walk the emptiness of my desert, every step I take in search of you. My night goes by with unclosed lids; my days are many hours of unhappy song. Oh love, come back, come back to me.

Oh love, I will live in your hut I will come into your arms and yield my ripeness. I will turn my finger into a pen, write these words onto your heart: Since you came into my life

I’d rather be in your fate than in the smiles of the gods. Please, Oh my lover, my god, come back to me come back. The evening’s-end dance melted into a riot of paints no longer edged by shape but by the half-awake/half-asleep point when dreamtime becomes real and realtime becomes dream, skein into silk of woven touch

Upanishad in Asian Pale so blended with being that life, sex, self, love, the fire of love and chill of fate, with its chill, too, of time and departure become one — no, no, not one. Not a thousand and one nor ten thousand and one a hundred thousand and one. Just . . . One.

It was the grandest dance an eye ever laid to.